newLISP focuses on the core components of LISP: lists, symbols, and lambda expressions. To these, newLISP adds arrays, implicit indexing on lists and arrays, and dynamic and lexical scoping. Lexical scoping is implemented using separate namespaces called contexts.

The result is an easier-to-learn LISP that is even smaller than most Scheme implementations, but which still has about 300 built-in functions. Approximately 200k in size, newLISP is built for high portability using only the most common UNIX system C-libraries. It loads quickly and has a small memory footprint. newLISP is as fast or faster than other popular scripting languages and uses very few resources.